I love to cook, but I've never been to school. Because it's apparently good enough, here's a little diary of some of my culinary adventures, none of which require difficult techniques or fancy equipment.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Okay, seriously... gardening is worth it. Yesterday, trying to be helpful, I went into harvest mode and picked a plenty amid swarms of thirsty mosquitoes. Along with a few of the "more standard" kinds of tomatoes growing in our garden are the following two secret winners that people that really like food should be growing or trying to get their hands on:

Sun-sugar gold (cherry) tomatoes, and

Nardello peppers (seriously!).

The tomatoes are cherry tomatoes in a vibrant yellow-orange with an unbelievably sweet, full taste that even tomato haters seem to consistently love. The Nardello peppers look like giant cayenne peppers that are beautifully red and crazy sweet as well, providing again a flavor that haters seem to enjoy. By way of proof, a picky thirteen-year-old girl tried one of the Nardellos yesterday while I was supping with a friend and said, "Oh my God, I absolutely hate peppers and love this thing." As of yesterday's picking, we had approximately five hundred thousand specimens of those two particularly delicious little treats. Oh... what to do.

Spaghetti sauce, duh! Adding a bit of basil and a bit of oregano from our herb garden to six chopped up such peppers, a mess of those little tomatoes (and a few bigger standard ones) that were either diced or pureed (about half and half on the two treatments), a couple of cloves of garlic, a splash of balsamic vinegar, a bit of salt, a couple of bay leaves, and a little olive oil made a marinara-ish sauce that I was tempted to rub on my face because it was so delicious. Of course, making it from scratch required about an hour of simmering/reducing to thicken up appropriately, but the flavor was well worth all of the chopping and cooking, not to mention the planting, watering, tending, weeding, and eventually picking, mosquito bites and all. I mean, seriously... wow.

Dinner tonight here was just that sauce on rotini with a chunk of sourdough that we picked up at the store on sale. The only adornment was a little bit of chopped white mushrooms with fresh rosemary added to the sauce just at the end. I didn't even include the zucchinis that we picked... but there's definitely tomorrow!